Discussion YMMV / SuicideSquad2016

Sorry about the deletions, I didn't mean to be so brusque with my editing :( And I apologize in advance if the following post is less than coherent.

To clarify my comment about the "shaky premise": I felt that your reasoning (that if audiences were willing to accept such an inherently ludicrous premise, then they were already willing to suspend their disbelief) was...implicit to a certain degree?

People already know that "recruiting a bunch of criminals as a disposable Black Ops team" is an unrealistic idea so it doesn't really need to be pointed out. In my opinion audiences will buy into a film with an inherently unrealistic premise as long as the film follows its own internal logic and the characters' motives and decisions are consistent and reasonable within the context of the film. A movie (in this case Suicide Squad) enters Idiot Plot territory when both film and characters fail to follow the movie's own logic and their own characterization.

So this is how the entry is written currently:

• Idiot Plot:
  • The Enchantress is only freed because June Moon is such an incompetent archaeologist that the very first thing she does upon finding The Enchantress' tomb is break open the bottle containing her.
  • Meanwhile, the only reason that Waller falsely believes that she can control The Enchantress is that Enchantress inexplicably left her heart in the tomb. Why her heart was cut out in the first place is never explained, nor is there any reason why she wouldn't simply carry it with her.
  • Waller's dossier on the Enchantress includes an image (and presumably hints to the whereabouts of) Enchantress' brother. Considering how little control she has over Enchantress, even if she doesn't think that information is important there's no reason to include it.
  • None of the people Waller is presenting to finds it the least bit unnerving that Enchantress, Waller's proof of how capable her team would be, is barely controlled and her human host says that she can't do that again directly in front of them.
  • When Enchantress goes to free her brother, Flag doesn't report it. Forgivable since he's in love with her, but... yeah. Less forgivable is the fact that other than Flag watching her, there is zero surveillance on Moon/Enchantress. And Moon doesn't let anyone know that Enchantress took her over, especially since it seems harrowing for her.
  • By the way, that attempt only worked because Waller was asleep and didn't notice her phone ringing. And because Waller had virtually no security measures protecting the brother's heart.
  • When Enchantress makes her duplicity clear, Waller decides to stab the heart. Yay... except she just stabs it repeatedly with a tiny instrument, giving Enchantress enough time to, in this case, survive getting her heart stabbed. Even if Waller didn't plan for that possibility, given her incredible power, her being off her leash for even a few seconds could cause catastrophic damage. You would think she would have means to instantly terminate her. You know, like she does for everyone else in Suicide Squad..
  • Waller is in Midway City. The entire mission is to get her out. There is no reason she couldn't be overseeing this from a safe location.
  • After the extraction takes place, Waller gets into a separate helicopter than the Suicide Squad, which means she has zero help when the helicopter is shot down. This leads to her capture and Enchantress using her brain to attack several secret targets and create tempting illusions for the Squad when they show up.

So maybe this is how the entry should start, to clarify how the plot only happens because several major characters are idiots.

• Idiot Plot: The movie's plot revolves around a constantly-escalating series of bad decisions, mostly made by Waller and her staff.

I'd also add the following:

• Good Idea: keeping the incredibly powerful witch at bay and on a leash by keeping her heart in an explosives laden brief case. Bad Idea: keeping the incredibly powerful witch's brother on a shelf in your closet accessible to anyone. (Moved up from What An Idiot)
• The helicopter crew for Waller's extraction from Midway City fire off bright chaff despite not facing a conventional foe, and all it does is draw attention, resulting in its crash. (Moved up from What An Idiot)
• Waller actively wanted Rick Flag and Dr. Moone to get involved, even though he's her handler and thus the person who will have to put her down if she slips her leash. Anyone with half a brain would realize that's a task you want to give to someone objective. (Moved up from What An Idiot)

I'd then move the following down to What An Idiot since they deal with bad decisions not related to Waller and her staff and are thus "less" connected to the plot

• The Enchantress is only freed because June Moon is such an incompetent archaeologist that the very first thing she does upon finding The Enchantress' tomb is break open the bottle containing her.

So the final entry would look like this:

• Idiot Plot: The movie's plot only happens because of a constantly-escalating series of bad decisions, mostly made by Waller and her staff or the government
  • The only reason that Waller falsely believes that she can control The Enchantress is that Enchantress inexplicably left her heart in the tomb. Why her heart was cut out in the first place is never explained, nor is there any reason why she wouldn't simply carry it with her.
  • Waller's dossier on the Enchantress includes an image (and presumably hints to the whereabouts of) Enchantress' brother. Considering how little control she has over Enchantress, even if she doesn't think that information is important there's no reason to include it.
  • None of the people Waller is presenting to finds it the least bit unnerving that Enchantress, Waller's proof of how capable her team would be, is barely controlled and her human host says that she can't do that again directly in front of them.
  • Good Idea: keeping the incredibly powerful witch at bay and on a leash by keeping her heart in an explosives laden brief case. Bad Idea: keeping the incredibly powerful witch's brother on a shelf in your closet accessible to anyone.
  • Waller actively wanted Rick Flag and Dr. Moone to get involved, even though he's her handler and thus the person who will have to put her down if she slips her leash. Anyone with half a brain would realize that's a task you want to give to someone objective
  • When Enchantress goes to free her brother, Flag doesn't report it. Forgivable since he's in love with her, but... yeah. Less forgivable is the fact that other than Flag watching her, there is zero surveillance on Moon/Enchantress. And Moon doesn't let anyone know that Enchantress took her over, especially since it seems harrowing for her. There's also the fact that Flag uses Moon/Enchantress on the initial mission despite knowing at this point she's a security risk.
  • By the way, that attempt only worked because Waller was asleep and didn't notice her phone ringing. And because Waller had virtually no security measures protecting the brother's heart.
  • When Enchantress makes her duplicity clear, Waller decides to stab the heart. Yay... except she just stabs it repeatedly with a tiny instrument, giving Enchantress enough time to, in this case, survive getting her heart stabbed. Even if Waller didn't plan for that possibility, given her incredible power, her being off her leash for even a few seconds could cause catastrophic damage. You would think she would have means to instantly terminate her. You know, like she does for everyone else in Suicide Squad..
  • Waller is in Midway City. The entire mission is to get her out. There is no reason she couldn't be overseeing this from a safe location.
  • After the extraction takes place, Waller gets into a separate helicopter than the Suicide Squad, which means she has zero help when the helicopter is shot down. This leads to her capture and Enchantress using her brain to attack several secret targets and create tempting illusions for the Squad when they show up.
  • The helicopter crew for Waller's extraction from Midway City fire off bright chaff despite not facing a conventional foe, and all it does is draw attention, resulting in its crash.

And for What An Idiot:

• The Enchantress is only freed because June Moon is such an incompetent archaeologist that the very first thing she does upon finding The Enchantress' tomb is break open the bottle containing her.
• Did nobody seriously see Griggs give Harley a phone and loudly proclaim that it's from the Joker right in front of them?

Your thoughts?

Sorry about that, I forgot about this.

So I asked here about overlap between What An Idiot and Idiot Plot.

The gist of it is that What An Idiot is broader, specifically for any instance where a character does something stupid and the audience has better ideas. Idiot Plot is when the plot is furthered by these idiotic moments. So basically, any idiotic moment (doesn't matter by whom... in fact, the more idiots, the better) go under Idiot Plot, and idiotic moments that don't affect the plot directly go under What An Idiot.

So...pretty much all the listed examples go under Idiot Plot, since they all make the plot possible (Moon breaking the bottle turns her into Enchantress, Griggs giving Harley the phone gets Joker involved)

More or less, yeah.

Why? I haven't seen the film but Tropes Are Not Good and CMs are not necessarily better than anti villains.

Joker doesn't need to be a Complete Monster to be a good character. While Leto's performance is strictly YMMV, Joker isn't always absolutely monstrous.

To be honest my thought (in OP) had more to do with questioning the punch of the Complete Monster title.

For example, in Halo's Sadie's Story, we have Kinsler, and he's pegged as a Complete Monster... but I tried Googling "halo kinsler", and the YMMV tab of the Halo 3 ODST page where he's listed is on the first page of results, suggesting obscurity. What good is the punch of that title if you barely know the bearer?

He's built up as an unpleasant, abusive warden who exists to make us feel sorry for Quinn and Deadshot.

He's the Hate Sink. Its only the The Scrappy when its unintentional.

How about this?

• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The movie spends a good chunk of its running time building up the Joker as a dangerously psychotic criminal mastermind with a massive crime syndicate and military-grade hardware at his fingertips, but then makes him more-or-less incidental to the main plot—even though making him the Big Bad could actually have improved the story in many ways. Unlike the Enchantress, the Joker is actually down-to-Earth enough to fight the Badass Normal Suicide Squad on their own terms, yet he could still have been a very plausible threat to Midway City, and making him a major antagonist could have given Harley a much more developed character arc by making her Conflicting Loyalties—whether as a member of the Squad or as Joker's partner—a much more central part of the film.
  • The film sold us on a story about a team of ex-supervillains seeking redemption as a crack Special Forces team and becoming True Companions in the process, but there are a few problems with the presentation that made it very hard for that premise to live up to its true potential. The Extremely Short Timespan means that there's very little time to believably build the Suicide Squad up as Fire-Forged Friends, since they still barely know each other by the end of the movie. And because most of the running time is consumed by the Squad's very first mission—where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and they're forced to save the world from another of Waller's recruits—we get very little time to see them functioning together as the hyper-competent team that they're supposed to be. It's a bit hard to cheer for the Squad when the movie seems to spend two hours telling us that recruiting super-criminals as soldiers is a terrible idea.